Of, by and for the Freedmen (with Allen C. Guelzo)
- patricklewisbaker
- Oct 1, 2020
- 1 min read
Updated: Aug 21
(On the aesthetics and history of the Freedman’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.)
Abraham Lincoln had scarcely been elected as the sixteenth president when the death threats began to arrive. They continued all through his presidency with such regularity that he set aside a special section of his upright desk in the White House, marked simply “Assassination,” to hold them. He should have taken them more seriously. After giving a speech on April 11, 1865, proposing at the end of the Civil War that freed slaves and black Union Army veterans in Louisiana be given the vote, an enraged white supremacist promised that he would “put him through.” And three nights later, that is just what that white supremacist—the actor John Wilkes Booth—did.
One hundred and fifty-five years later, some of the descendants of the people Lincoln determined to free from slavery are, by a cruel twist of logic, demanding the toppling of the bronze Freedman’s Memorial (sometimes known as the Emancipation Memorial) to Lincoln in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C. “This statue right here embodies the white supremacy and the disempowerment of black people that is forced upon us by white people,” announced Glenn Foster, the founder of Free Neighborhood, at a raucous meeting held at the Memorial on June 23…